


In the Looking Glass

by SectoBoss



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blackwatch, Blackwatch Amelie, Blackwatch Reaper | Gabriel Reyes, F/F, Reaper!Morrison, Talon Lena "Tracer" Oxton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-03 03:28:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11523591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: Blackwatch sniper Amélie Lacroix goes on a mission to capture – or eliminate – Talon’s top assassin, a ruthless killer with powers over time itself. She never expected it to be an easy job, but she is still unprepared for the revelations the night will bring.





	In the Looking Glass

**Author's Note:**

> I found this on my hard drive and finally got around to uploading it.

_Hungary_

_6 years after the Zurich Disaster  
_

The last time Amélie had been to Budapest had been on her honeymoon.

That Budapest had been a gleaming city under a warm summer sun. Coffee and cake in sidewalk cafés, hand-in-hand walks beside the glittering blue ribbon of the River Danube, smiles and easy laughter over Michelin-star meals in restaurants she’d never normally be able to afford to eat at. Gérard, bless him, wanting to impress her despite her constant insistences that if he hadn’t impressed her already then they’d never have gotten married.

That Budapest had been bright and wonderful and full of hope and promise, untouched by the Omnic Crisis and the strife that had followed in its wake. There hadn’t been assassins stalking the streets and snipers on rooftops. Or maybe there had been, but back then she’d just never spotted them.

But that was then, and this was now, and more had changed than Amélie could comprehend. So she sat, perched on the edge of a rooftop fifty feet above the city’s glowing streets as dusk faded into night, and fiddled aimlessly with her sniper rifle while she waited for new orders.

The rest of her team – all of them, herself included, decked out in the black-and-navy of Blackwatch’s sniper teams – was set up a metre or two away from her, further down the edge of the roof. One had a pair of night-vision binoculars to his eyes, scanning the windows of the apartment complex across the street from them. Amélie had her own equipment, higher-spec than the rest, a hard-light visor projected across her eyes that picked out heat signatures through the aging concrete. Most of them were just ordinary people living out their lives, unaware they were being watched. One of them was who she was here for, and whoever and whatever she actually was, the one thing she certainly _wasn’t_ was ordinary.

“No movement visible at the target, ma’am,” the soldier said after a moment, putting his binoculars down.

“Copy that,” Amélie said distantly.

“Are we sure we’re in the right place?” another asked irritably. “We’ve been watching this building all day and nothing’s happened.”

Her sniper team was new, just recruited from whatever UN member had some soldiers to spare and a debt to repay. She didn’t know any of their names, just callsigns. Blackwatch liked to compartmentalise like that. Reyes would know, she thought, but Reyes was currently making his way up towards their target in that apartment building and he’d never taken kindly to idle radio chatter unless he was the one making it.

“Beer in this city’s a euro an’ fifty a pint, fuck yeah we’re in the right place,” a third one said, to a chorus of quiet laughter.

“Alright, that’s enough,” Amélie said coolly.

They went silent. Another one picked up her binoculars, scanned again. Still nothing. One of them sneezed and Amélie headed the faint moan of disgust has he tried to wipe it off the inside of his balaclava.

“Christ, mate, that’s rank,” another one muttered, holding out a ragged tissue.

“Dunno why we have to wear these things anyway,” the one who’d sneezed grumbled, wiping away something Amélie tried not to look too closely at.

She didn’t know their names but from their accents and slang she figured most of her team tonight were from the UK. Ex-SAS, at a guess. She’d developed quite an appreciation for the accent, back when… well, never mind.

“Well us bein’ here ain’t exactly legal is it? You want your face on the evening news?” another asked, higher-ranked than the rest, Amélie’s second-in-command tonight in all but name.

“Fuck, no.”

“Then shut up and keep it on. And blow your nose before the mission next time, you goddamn animal.” A few quiet snickers. What little Amélie could see of the man who’d sneezed turned beetroot red.

There was silence on the rooftop for a little while, the rumble of traffic filtering up from below. Amélie spent a few minutes gazing up at the moon that hung low in the sky, charting the Horizon colony’s familiar calligraphy of circles and lines like she had with Gérard and Lena all those years ago, then looked back down and scolded herself for letting herself get distracted.

She thought she heard, very faintly, one of them mutter to another: “Go on. Ask her. You said you would.”

“Yeah, but, _now_?” came the whispered response.

“Go _on_.”

“Okay…”

A throat cleared awkwardly somewhere to her right. She glanced over, away from her scope, at a row of masked faces that somehow still managed to look a little embarrassed and awkward.

“If one of you is about to ask me out on a date, I’m already spoken for,” she said evenly.

“Nothing like that ma’am,” one of them – the boldest – said. “It’s just… well, the lads were wondering…”

“ _Oui_?”

“Well, I mean, we all know who you are right? And there’re a bunch of rumours and whatnot. So, ah… did you _really_ know Ana Amari?”

Now there was a question Amélie hadn’t been expecting. But it made sense, she supposed. Of course this sniper team would want to know if she’d known the greatest practitioner of their art in living memory.

“Did I know her?” she laughed quietly. “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

The soldier who’d asked her spoke again. “How so? If, ah, you don’t mind me asking…”

“She trained me.”

That shut them up. One of them gave a low whistle of appreciation.

“Guess we’re in safe hands then,” the soldier who was still scanning the building through her binoculars said with an almost audible grin.

“For all the good it did her,” Amélie sighed. “I was there when she died.”

Dead silence from the rest of her team. The death of Ana Amari was one of those events that everyone knew _of_ but no-one _about_. Rumour, conjecture and smoke-and-mirrors all swirled around the death of Overwatch’s second in command. Back when there had still been an Overwatch, before the disaster in Zurich tore it all down and Blackwatch split off to save its own skin.

“Who killed her?” the one furthest from her asked after a moment. “They never really said on the news…”

 “I heard it was an omnic. Some rogue sniper droid left over from the Crisis,” one of them butted in authoritatively.

“Nah, mate, it was…” another began.

“It was Talon,” Amélie said. Her jaw set in an expression of cold, measured hate. “A Talon assassin. Not even a sniper.”

“Oh,” one of the soldiers said, sounding a little disappointed, as if she’d been hoping for a tale of an epic sniper battle between the great Ana Amari and whoever it was who had finally gotten lucky enough to take her down.

“The same Talon assassin who murdered my husband,” Amélie added.

“Jesus,” one of them muttered.

“And the same Talon assassin who, if our intelligence is correct, is holed up in there.” She pointed across the street, to the window of the apartment building they’d been staking out all day.

She saw one or two of them blink nervously at that. Reyes had decided at the start of this mission that that particular morsel of information was need-to-know, but quite frankly she was getting sick of Blackwatch’s insistence that only the bare minimum of intelligence be passed to its soldiers in the field. Protecting the top brass at the expense of the grunts was how she saw it, and she didn’t like it at all.

“So make your first shots count,” she added, turning back to her scope and glaring through it. “This _connasse_ won’t let you get a second.”

 

* * *

 

Lena Oxton woke with a start, sticky with sweat, in familiar clothes, in an unfamiliar place.

Four bare walls, a ragged sofa, a sink and toilet. Faint sounds of traffic outside.

_Have I…  
_

No. The Slipstream was years ago. That was all over now. The black lump of machinery strapped to her front, angry red light spilling from its core, was testament to that.

_So where am I?  
_

She got to her feet, unsteady, groggy, a raging headache battering her temples.

_A hangover? Too much to drink?_

No, no, this was something else.

She staggered over to the sink, squinted at her reflection in it. Brown hair gelled back. Bloodshot hazel eyes. Bruises and a split lip. She raised a hand to rub her eyes.

Blood on her hands, rust-brown, old and dried. She recoiled.

Strange machinery on her wrists. No. Wait. She recognised these. Memories began to filter back, slowly, as if arriving exhausted from some distant place.

There had been a man. A woman. Children, a dog. A family. Bodyguards. Gunfire. Her.

_Oh God…_

Something buzzed in her ear, vibrated against her skull, and went quiet. A fly? She swatted at the air. The buzzing came back. Not a fly. An earpiece, an augment, anchored into her skull, drilled into the bone. So she couldn’t take it off. It was very important that she never took it off. Why? That memory was still on its way.

A voice in her ear, heavy, inhuman, a rasp with a tinge of the familiar about it.

“Agent Shrike.”

_What? No, no, that’s not…  
_

“Mission report.”

“Who is this?” she asked. “I’m not…”

“Mission report.”

“Who are you? What the hell’s going on?”

Faintly, a different voice in her ear. Some distant microphone picking up a second person: “She’s come back again. Told you she would. Girl’s a fighter.” A pause, then a curse. “Blackwatch is moving in. They’ve found her.”

“We’re out of time,” hissed the first person. “We have to relocate her.”

“She can do that herself. Here. The new control words,” said the second.

“What’s going on?” she whimpered again, not knowing if the voices in her ear could even hear her.

“Agent Shrike, listen carefully,” said the one with the damaged voice.

Then, in a lower tone, quiet, as if trying not to be heard by anyone else: “And please, forgive me for this, Lena.”

“Wha…” she began.

“Copperplate. Evergreen. Sixteen.”

Suddenly she remembered why they didn’t want her taking the earpiece out. She clawed at it.

“Halcyon. Eleven.”

“No! No, no, _please no_!”

A flare of agony as she tried desperately to rip away the earpiece and it clung to her skull.

“Fractal.”

Lena Oxton screamed. Then whatever took her place stopped the screaming, and simply said:

“Shrike here.”

 

* * *

 

“Sniper team, come in.”

“Loud and clear.”

“Any signs of life in there, Amélie?”

“I’ve got one faint heat signature, minor movement. Nothing else.”

“Alright. Keep your eyes peeled.”

A quiet scoff. “As if I would do anything else.”

Gabriel Reyes grinned humourlessly. “Copy that. Out.”

There were six of them in the elevator, clattering upwards. Himself, McCree, four Blackwatch commandos.

“Remember everyone, I want this one alive,” he said. “This is smash-and-grab, not kill on sight.”

“Yes, sir,” said one of the commandos.

“But I won’t cry at this bitch’s funeral,” Reyes added after a moment, barely audible over the rattle of the elevator’s mechanisms.

The commandos glanced at each other through their Kevlar balaclavas.

“Understood, sir.”

To his left McCree was busy loading his revolver, slotting each bullet into its chamber with a quiet _click_.

“You sure it was a good idea to bring Amélie along?” he asked quietly, tilting the brim of his hat so Reyes could see the concern in his eyes. “She’s got a lot of history with this one…”

“We’ve all got history with this one,” Reyes said simply, angrily. Then he grinned half-heartedly. “And what makes you think she gave me a choice?”

“Fair point,” Jesse conceded, and fell quiet.

The lift rattled upwards. In Reyes’ ear, a comms device pinged.

“Commander.” A synthesised voice, carefully modulated to sound not-quite-human.

“Athena.”

“I regret to inform you that I have been unable to hack the security feeds for the apartment complex. You will be operating blind in there. Apologies.”

Gabriel frowned. “Talon’s pet hacker again?” he ventured.

“If only,” Athena said, sounding exasperated. “With her I stand a chance of winning. No, I cannot hack the building’s security because of its age. These systems are badly outdated – my code simply isn’t compatible.” She paused for a moment. “It is like trying to hack _clockwork_ ,” she said with a palpable note of disgust.

“Don’t worry about it,” Gabriel replied. “We’ll manage. See if you can get some drones in the air, though. Nothing wrong with a few extra sets of eyes.”

“Affirmative, commander,” Athena said, sounding happy she would at least have something to do. “Although I should advise that increased aerial support decreases the likelihood that this remains a _covert_ operation.” And with that she disconnected.

“Word from Athena, she can’t get eyes on us in here,” Gabriel told the rest of his team. “So watch each other’s backs.”

“She does like to mother-hen us,” Jesse chuckled.

“You complaining?”

“Hell, no.”

Reyes flicked the safety catches off his shotguns with a loud _clack-clack_. Privately, Jesse suspected his commander did that more for show than anything else.

“Alright everyone,” Reyes said as the elevator ground to a halt and the doors wheezed open. “Let’s get this done. By the book, and fuckup-free.”

 

* * *

 

She had mere minutes to get dressed properly, test her equipment, prepare herself. But Shrike was nothing if not a quick worker.

And after all, time was on her side.

Oxton would have laughed at the joke. Shrike laughed too, although she wasn’t supposed to. Wasn’t supposed to take joy in anything other than slaughter. But the two of them were cut from the same cloth, at the end of the day, no matter how hard the doctors and the neurosurgeons tried to mould Shrike into a completely different person.

Her accelerator’s capacitor charged with an electric whine. _Testing, testing…  
_

She blinked once, twice across the room. No faults. Good.

The machinery on her wrists hummed. Hard-light projectors signalled they were ready for use. Again, good.

Earlier, before she’d briefly been Oxton again, she had wadded a nano-camera into a glob of chewing gum and stuck it outside the door to her safehouse. Now, in a screen on her wrist, she watched six grainy and pixelated figures approach down the corridor outside towards her door.

Targeting software picked out Gabriel Reyes, Blackwatch commander. Jesse McCree, Blackwatch second-in-command. _Brought out the big guns, I see_ , she thought _._ Four others, identities unknown, who wouldn’t pose problems.

She clapped her hands together. Sparks danced across her palms.

Hard-light armour thrummed into being, angry red, covering her head and face and replacing it with a sleek, almost avian visage that straddled the line between armour and art. She saw the world in shades of crimson and wondered vaguely if that Vaswani woman had ever discovered what her ‘special commission’ was being used for.

The men outside were lining up. Breach-and-clear was written all over their body language.

Shrike sat herself down on the apartment’s dirty sofa, legs crossed, elbows on knees, armoured chin on hands.

_Ready when you are, lads._

* * *

 

“Bloody heap of shite,” Amélie heard one of her soldiers grumble to himself as he whacked the side of his binoculars.

“Is there a problem?” she inquired with a certain measure of ice in her voice.

“Ah… nothing serious, ma’am. Just my heat-targeting gear’s on the fritz again.”

“Oh?”

“Lag spikes, ma’am. Or something like that, I guess…”

Amélie scowled. “Let me guess. Like she’s teleporting? Around the room?” _Dieu_ , that word sounded so stupid coming out of her mouth. People in real life weren’t meant to be able to do what the woman in that room could do.

“Yeah,” the soldier said, and then looked across at her with a squint. “Wait, how did you know…?”

“How much did Reyes tell you about the target?”

“Codenamed Shrike, fast on her feet, shoot to stop, kill if we must.”

Amélie swore. “ _Compartmentalisation_ ,” she spat, like it was another curse. “Reyes didn’t tell you enough. Those aren’t lag spikes. She can do that.”

Confusion was writ large across the soldier’s face. “But that’s not…”

“How else do you think someone got the drop on Ana Amari?”

Confusion became shock, became horror. “ _But that’s not…!_ ”

“First shot counts, everyone,” Amélie said again, raising her voice and sighting down her scope towards the window of the apartment. The other soldiers had overheard and were looking at her with bewildered eyes. “The dead don’t get a second.”

On her earpiece: “All units, final checks.”

 

* * *

 

“Sniper team ready. And _merde_ , Gabriel, have you briefed my team _at all_ on who we are tackling?”

“Now’s not the time, Amélie.”

“And when is-”

“Shut it. Athena, time on those drones?”

“Drone support inbound, commander. Hungarian officials are beginning to get curious, though. I’m monitoring communication surges across the city.”

“Can’t be helped,” Reyes grumbled. “All teams, ready.”

He glanced over at Jesse, who nodded.

He hefted his shotguns. The Blackwatch soldier nearest to the door slipped a breaching charge onto the handle.

“Prepare to breach.”

The soldier started counting down.

“Three.”

Jesse licked his lips, rested his hand on the butt of his revolver.

“Two.”

Gabriel remembered for a moment all the times he’d done this with Jack back in Overwatch, during the Crisis and after, let himself slip into the routine. But at the same time he pushed thoughts of Jack Morrison out of his head. He could mourn the dead later.

“One.”

Amélie watched the window of the target apartment like a hawk, not even blinking. _Go on, stick your head out, you little bastard, I dare you…  
_

The breaching charge went off with a bang and a cloud of dirty white smoke. Charred wood and melted metal replaced the door’s lock.

“ _Breaching, breaching! Go, go, go!_ ”

Gabriel was second through the door, following the soldier who’d placed the charge. He felt the bite of adrenaline as the familiar words rang in his ears. For a moment it was an Omnium core on the other side of that door, it was a Deadlock hideout, it was a Talon base, it was any one of all the places he’d gatecrashed in this way over the years. Wherever you went it was the same.

Most people think the first through the door is in the most danger. They’re not. If you’ve done your job properly the enemy’s still disorientated from the door breach and haven’t had the time to take aim yet. But by the second person they’ve got their wits back and their trigger fingers are tightening.

Gabriel always went in second when he could. “More fun when they shoot back,” was how he’d explained it away to Jack, a lifetime ago. But even to him that sometimes sounded a little hollow.

The first soldier swept the room ahead of him, gun swivelling from side to side, and moved on. No threats, then, so it was Gabriel’s job to lock the place down. His eyes swept the room in an instant and were immediately dragged to its centre, where a woman in dark clothes was sat cross-legged on the sofa. Instead of a head, a helmet of crimson hard-light perched on top of her scrawny shoulders.

_Nice to meet you at last, Agent Shrike,_ he thought as he bore down on her with both shotguns raised – he didn’t like her hard-light’s chances against a twin blast from both and he got the feeling she was smart enough to know that too – but what he said was: “You! On your knees! Hands on your head! Now, move it!”

Shrike didn’t move, didn’t give any indication she’d even noticed the six Blackwatch operatives storming her apartment.

The rest of the soldiers clattered in behind him.

“Clear!”

“Clear over here!”

“Bathroom, clear!”

“Just us and her, then,” Jesse drawled, walking up to Reyes with his revolver drawn. Shrike now sat in the middle of a ring of pointed guns. He turned to face her. “Thinkin’ you might want to give yourself up, darling. I can promise you that it’s the easy way out.”

Shrike angled her head ever so slightly towards him. Blank red hard-light stared him down.

“Make it easy on yourself,” Jesse added, a little unnerved by the faceless stare he was getting and trying not to show it.

“Or don’t,” Gabriel snarled. “Makes no difference to me.” He nodded to two of the commandos behind Shrike. “You – blow her head off if she moves a muscle. And you – search her for weapons. The rest of you, sweep this place from top to bottom. Jesse, keep an eye on her.”

“And what’re you going to do, boss?” Jesse asked. “Put the kettle on?”

It was an expression he’d learned from Lena Oxton, back when he’d known her, back before they’d lost her to God-knew-where.

“I’m going to get on the line to the good doctor, and tell her she’ll soon have some choice Talon augments to play with,” Gabriel sneered with a contemptuous glance at Shrike. He took a pace back and raised his finger to his ear.

_Intimidation game, huh?_ Jesse thought. It might even work, he supposed, if there was anything under Shrike’s visor that could be intimidated. It suddenly occurred to him that if it weren’t for people who were more in the know than he was calling her ‘she’, he wouldn’t know the first thing about the person sat cross-legged in front of him. He’d never seen their face – to the best of his knowledge, no-one had. It could actually be an omnic under that combat armour and hard-light for all he could tell.

He levelled his Peacekeeper at her in a way that said _I don’t want to shoot, but believe me I will_. Behind Shrike, one of the commandos reached down to start searching her.

And then everything happened very quickly.

Shrike reached up and gripped the arms of the commando who was reaching for her, moving so fast her hands seemed to go from in her lap to around the man’s wrists without passing through the air in between. Jesse saw the man’s eyes widen behind his balaclava. There was a sparking, crackling noise and the palms of Shrike’s gloves suddenly electrified. The soldier she was grasping screamed as the voltage burned through him and he collapsed to the floor in a twitching, smoking heap.

Jesse’s finger tightened on his revolver’s trigger and he fired a shot directly into Shrike’s faceplate. There was a flash of red light and the bullet whirred through empty air, chewing a hole in the battered sofa where she’d been sitting less than half a second ago. A streak of crimson flashed across the room and Shrike reappeared less than an inch from another commando’s face. She grabbed the rifle from the hands of the startled soldier and clubbed him around the head with the stock. The commando reeled. The other two panicked, took aim, and fired as Shrike vanished again. The bullets tore through the air where she’d been and into the soldier she’d attacked. He crumpled and fell.

The other two soldiers barely had time to register their horrible mistake before Shrike had blinked up to another one of them. She dodged a frantic, desperate blow and neatly sidestepped Jesse’s shot as he tried to get a bead on her. Behind him, Jesse heard Gabriel roaring at them to shoot her.

_Easier said than done, boss_ , Jesse thought wildly as he tried to aim again.

There was a deafening roar as Gabriel fired both his shotguns at her but none of his shot found its mark. Shrike’s gloved crackled again and she tased the remaining two Blackwatch soldiers, shoving an electrified palm into the chest of one and the neck of the other. They yelped and toppled to the grimy floor. The machinery on Shrike’s wrists hummed and glowed and twin hard-light blades flared into existence, an angry red to match the hard-light of her visor. She went down on one knee and buried the blades in the soldiers’ chests. The men choked, gurgled, went quiet.

In his ear Jesse could hear Amélie shouting for status updates, demanding to know what the hell was going on in there. He threw himself to one side as Shrike blinked towards him, landing in an undignified heap as she soared over his head. Thrumming blades sliced the air above his head, carved through the top of his beloved hat like the tough fabric wasn’t there at all.

Shrike was now between him and Gabriel, and Jesse realised this might be their only chance to get out of here alive.

Gabriel snarled and levelled his shotguns at her. Shrike tensed, ready to blink to safety. On the floor behind her, Jesse’s hand went to his belt and clasped one of the flashbangs he kept there. Those things had saved his life more times than he could count and he swore on them almost more than he did on his Peacekeeper.

“Hey!” he hollered. “Pick on someone your own size!”

That swept, almost birdlike helmet swivelled to face him. Shrike wheeled around – and straight into Jesse’s flashbang. Jesse had just enough time to shield his eyes, and Gabriel had turned away, knowing instinctively what was coming. But Shrike had no time to prepare. She screeched in pain as the blinding light shone through her visor, which darkened to compensate just a moment too late.

Jesse looked back up. Gabriel had already recovered – of course he had, the Soldier Enhancement Program had done a good job with him – and as Shrike stumbled and staggered, trying to get the sight back in her eyes and the ringing out of her ears, he came up behind her, shoved a shotgun into the small of her back, and pulled the trigger. The gun roared. Shrike went down in a spray of wet chunks.

Except she didn’t.

For a moment everything went strangely grey, as if all the colour had been sucked out of the world. Jesse’s hearing suddenly felt muffled like he was underwater. He watched in confusion and mounting horror as the machinery on Shrike’s chest glowed an angry red. All of a sudden there were _two_ of the woman – one toppling down to the ground, her guts spilling out of the hole Gabriel had blasted in her stomach, but another, one who had by luck or judgement dodged the shot, one who had dived out of the way with a heartbeat to spare. Jesse raised his gun, aiming at the dodging one even as his mind tried to understand the impossibility he was seeing. His arm moved slowly, like he was forcing it through wet cement. Before his eyes, the Shrike who had died messily on the floor faded away – and the one who had dodged assumed solidity.

Then the colour came back into the world, Jesse moved at the right speed again, and Shrike was unharmed, pulling herself up from the dive she’d made to dodge Gabriel’s shot – the one no human should have been able to make, the one that Jesse’s brain screamed at him was impossible.

Gabriel started at the empty space in front of his gun like the world had gone mad. Jesse aimed at Shrike with a hand that didn’t feel as steady as it ought to.

 “Seeing double there, boys?” Shrike chuckled. Her voice was synthetic, electronic, a harsh, mocking drone. A part of Jesse wondered if the helmet was doing that or if that was how her voice always sounded. But what did that matter, he thought. Angela could answer that question when she had Shrike on a mortuary slab. All Jesse cared about in that moment was ending this. He sighted down the revolver’s barrel at her, and he felt she was somehow glaring back at him from behind her expressionless, opaque visor.

“Catch as catch can,” she sneered, and blinked. Not towards him, as Jesse feared, throwing his mechanical arm up to protect himself from a blow that didn’t come. Instead she blinked once, twice, three times, across the room towards the curtained window and then straight out through it with a crash of splintering glass and an almost playful little cheer.

Jesse and Gabriel were left in a suddenly quiet and empty room.

“What in the goddamn hell is that woman?” Jesse wondered out loud, and groaned in pain as Gabriel helped him to his feet. He’d landed badly from when he’d thrown himself out of the way of Shrike’s blink, and his organic arm was complaining about it.

Gabriel around the room, at the four fallen soldiers, the shattered window, the clock on the wall that didn’t yet read three minutes since they’d broken the door down. “Dead, is what she is,” he growled. “If I ever get my hands on her.”

_That’s a mighty big ‘if’, boss,_ _given what we’ve just seen,_ Jesse thought, but kept it to himself.

“Amélie?” Gabriel said, raising a hand to his ear and cycling through comms channels. “Target has escaped. It’s on you now.”

“She can run, but she can’t hide,” came the reply though both their earpieces. There was enough hate in it to send a shiver up Jesse’s spine.

 

* * *

 

The other members of Amélie’s sniper team shouted in surprise as the apartment window across the street from them shattered into a thousand fragments. Something crimson and black hurtled through the cloud of glass.

“What the - !”

“Jesus Christ!”

“All units, fire! Shoot to kill!”

For a moment all Amélie could think of was Cairo -

_\- sand and dust in her eyes, Ana Amari’s weathered face creasing in shock, blood on her lips as Shrike buried one blade in her chest and another through her eye, Amélie writhing on the ground in agony as the shattered bones in her legs ground together, Shrike kicking Ana over the building’s edge with an almost playful little flourish, all Amélie could do was watch, her own rifle lying useless in the dirt by her side –  
_

\- and she snarled in anger. Her eyes narrowed. Targeting displays in her visor blinked and whirled as they tried to get a lock on Shrike. She felt the press of her rifle’s stock against her shoulder, the cold metal of the trigger on her fingertip.

Across from her, Shrike was falling. Glass shards tumbled around her. It looked oddly beautiful, Amélie thought in a detached sort of way. All those sparkling fragments shimmering around her, reflecting the lights of Budapest and the glimmer of the moon. She sighted through her scope. Shrike, arms flailing and legs kicking as she fell, like she was trying to fight off the fall that would surely kill her, came into sharp focus.

Amélie could just let her fall. But she wasn’t going to give Shrike the satisfaction of dying on her own terms. Breathe in, breathe out. Control yourself, slow your heartbeat. Ana’s lessons came rushing back. This was for Gérard, for Ana, for Mondatta, for all the rest, she decided. This wasn’t just revenge – this was putting things right.

All those thoughts went through her head in half a second as her trigger finger tightened. Across from her, Shrike seemed to recover herself. She stopped her uncoordinated fall, executed a neat front flip as if this were all some wonderful game, and then twisted around to face the concrete wall she was falling past. Crimson light suddenly burned from her wrists. Hard-light blades shimmered into being. With a hard shove, she buried them to the hilt in the wall.

The edge on them was almost atomically fine – hard-light could be sharpened down to the nanoscale if the emitter was good enough, and Talon had clearly forked out for the best – and they sliced into the reinforced concrete like it was paper. Shrike began to leave twin scars in the building’s side in her wake. With a vicious twist she jerked her wrists around, so the blades were no longer edge-down, no longer cutting but rather acting as anchors. Seven stories above the pavement below, she came to a sudden, bone-rattling halt.

Amélie had been tracking her down the building at the speed of her fall and didn’t anticipate this move. Shrike disappeared from her scope as she kept tracking down for a moment. She swore and tried to realign her aim. The rest of her team, she noticed, stupid useless _cretins_ , had yet to even aim properly, let alone fire a shot.

In her ear, her comms device squawked. Gabriel’s voice: “Amélie? Target has escaped. It’s on you now.”

“She can run, but she can’t hide,” Amélie hissed back.

Shrike was back in her sights, pinned to the wall by her own blades, pinned in her crosshairs and rather reminding Amélie of a fly caught in a web. Her aim found the base of the other woman’s skull. Amélie exhaled, took a fraction of a second to savour the moment, her finger tightened on the trigger.

Shrike deactivated her blades. Amélie fired. The bullet smacked into the concrete centimetres above Shrike’s head as she fell again. With a streak of red Shrike blinked, down to the ground, landing neatly on the sidewalk. Her angular red helmet turned upwards, looking across to the rooftop Amélie and her team were on. Through a scope and a visor, the two women briefly stared each other down.

With another blink, Shrike was gone, hurtling down the street away from the Blackwatch soldiers. Amélie swore, lowered her rifle, and stood up.

“Gabriel? Target is on the move,” she said. Her visor overlaid a map in blue hard-light across her vision. “Heading down the street towards Andrássy.”

Andrássy Avenue was one of Budapest’s main streets, a centuries-old boulevard that cut through the old heart of the city, on the east bank of the Danube. No matter how late the hour, it always teemed with pedestrians and vehicles – Shrike clearly didn’t care about witnesses. Or maybe she figured she could use a few human shields.

Amélie wasn’t about to give her the chance. Without even waiting for Gabriel’s reply, she slung her rifle over her shoulder and started running. “Athena!” she gasped, ignoring the shouts from her sniper team as she left them behind. “What happened to those drones?”

“Still in the air, Captain Lacroix,” came Athena’s response. “I have assigned a trio to monitor Shrike’s progression through the city. A word of warning, though – Hungarian authorities are beginning to query the deployment of military-spec drones over their capital city. If requested to, I will have no choice but to take them offline. Commander Reyes insists this must remain a covert op, after all.”

After her run-in with Shrike in Cairo, Amélie’s legs were prosthetic from the knees down. She came to the edge of the rooftop and launched herself forward with augmented strength. She soared over the street below, and halfway across shot out a grapple from the gauntlet on her wrist, using it to reel her in over the last few metres to the next rooftop.

“ _À l’enfer_ with covert, Athena!” she spat back as she hit the roof tiles with a neat forward roll, sprang to her feet and kept running. “We’re not letting her get away!”

“Noted, but the commander’s orders have priority,” Athena replied primly.

Amélie growled wordlessly. Another roof ledge, another leap no baseline human could do. _Bet you regret trying to cripple me now, you bitch_ , Amélie thought with malicious glee, cold air rushing past her, Shrike’s red trail still visible on the street below. _You only made me stronger._

“Target turning left, onto Andrássy,” Athena noted.

“ _Oui, oui, je la vois,_ ” Amélie gasped, unconsciously lapsing into French. She skidded to a halt on a rooftop overlooking Andrássy Avenue, her heart hammering in her chest, the roar of her blood in her ears. The wide road below her was crammed with late-night shoppers and couples, taxis and cars speeding in both directions down the ribbon of tarmac. Footsteps and voices and car engines and horns reached her ears. In front of her eyes, her visor whirred and whined as it tried to co-ordinate with Athena’s drones and pick out Shrike in the crowd. Amélie squinted past it, looking for herself.

There she was! Still far ahead of Amélie, but slower now she had to fight her way through the crowds. And fight was the right word, Amélie noted with a twist in her guts – she saw crimson hard-light flash, and a man who’d been blocking Shrike’s escape toppled sideways with both hands clutching his neck. There were screams. From her vantage point, Amélie saw the crowds shudder like a nervous animal, people hearing the screams and starting to panic, to run.

She looked further down the street, to where Andrássy met another road called Nagykörút in a plaza called the Oktogon. There was a subway station down there, she realised. Shrike had probably planned her escape.

_Merde!_

She did her best to ignore the screams from below and began to run again. Down on Andrássy Avenue, Shrike came to the realisation that she was going to get nowhere in this crowd that was rapidly becoming a panicked crush. She shoved her way over to the road and began to weave in between the cars, blinking whenever her chronal accelerator allowed. Up on the rooftops, and in the skies above, her every move was desperately watched.

“Amélie? Amélie, do you copy?” Gabriel’s voice in Amélie’s ear, sounding equal parts worried and infuriated.

“In pursuit!” she gasped, pushing her prosthetics to their limits and being rewarded with a spurt of extra speed – and a host of warning sirens blaring in her cranial augments. “Target’s headed for Oktogon plaza, Gabe, I think she’s heading for the subway!”

“We’re inbound, ETA five minutes,” Gabriel said. Amélie could hear the roar of SUV engines over the comm-link.

“She’ll be gone in two!” On the streets below, Shrike had reached the intersection where Andrássy fanned out to become the broad sweep of the Oktagon.

“Make sure that doesn’t happen,” Gabriel snapped, and cut the connection.

“Oh, Gabe, but I thought this was to be a covert op?” Amélie muttered. But inside she felt nothing but relief. One last mad dash took her to the edge of a roof that overlooked the same intersection Shrike had reached moments ago. Her visor picked out the fleeing Talon agent, now in the centre of the plaza and slowing down. That red hard-light helmet glowed like the bullseye in a target. In a flash, Amélie was down on one knee and her rifle was back in her hands.

 

* * *

 

In the middle of the Oktagon, Shrike came to a halt and looked around, at the roads either side of her and then up at the night sky above. _Damn_. They were supposed to be here already.

“Agent Shrike.” A voice in her earpiece, not one of the ones from before. A new one. Synthesised and deep, masculine, sounding perpetually on the border of a quiet, contained rage.

“Hello, Anni,” she said, still sweeping the plaza.

“Incorrect designation. Call me Anubis.” Talon’s pet AI loathed nicknames.

“Whatever, mate. What’s the news?”

“Agent Ghost is inbound for extraction. Arrival by air. Ninety seconds. Remain in the Oktagon. Advisory: Blackwatch agent Amélie Lacroix has pursued you to extraction location. Secondary: Blackwatch AI Athena is monitoring your location through airborne drones.”

“All eyes on me, eh?” Shrike giggled. “Can you do anything about it?”

“Attempting override of drones.”

“Good luck with that. In the meantime, I think I’ll keep my head down.”

“I require no luck,” the AI droned haughtily. “I have superior code. Athena is good – I am better.”

“Pride and falls, mate,” said Shrike. In the centre of the Oktagon was a memorial to the dead of the Omnic Crisis and she ducked behind its granite bulk. “I wanna speak to Ghost.”

“Patching through.” There was a burst of static.

“Shrike?” came the damaged, rasping voice of Ghost a few moments later.

“Heya, boss. Made it to our rendezvous, but you’ve stood me up! How’s that for bad manners- _shite!_ ”

A whine through the air next to her, a spray of dust from the ground next to her, and a supersonic _crack_ of a rifle. Amélie’s bullet missed Shrike’s head by a hair’s breadth, passing so close its shockwave cracked and splintered the hard-light of her helmet. The emitters in her jaw hummed busily as they rebuilt it. Shrike blinked back as another bullet split the air where she’d been.

“Shrike? _Shrike?_ ” Ghost shouted in her ear as she scrambled for cover.

“Lacroix has me pinned down! Extraction zone is compromised!”

“Are you alright?”

“For now! How about you get a bloody move on?”

“Flying flat out, Shrike. Just… stay alive.”

Shrike looked up. Something above her jumped from one rooftop to another, moving around, trying to get a clear shot. Above that, hanging in the sky like a new star, the red anti-gravs of the Talon VTOL coming down to pick her up.

“No worries…” she started to say, and then there was another bark of a rifle, and all Ghost could hear in his own earpiece was static.

 

* * *

 

“Target down.”

Amélie’s voice dripped with satisfaction. She didn’t even try to stop herself from grinning.

“Good work!” Gabriel cried. “ETA two minutes, get down there and confirm that kill.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice.”

Amélie executed a neat dive from the rooftop, using her grappling line to abseil down the marble front of one of the ornate buildings that ringed the Oktagon. Her prosthetics clacked and hissed as they took the impact of her landing. She frowned – they sounded damaged from her hell-for-leather pursuit of Shrike. She’d have to make sure Ziegler took a look at them when she got back to base.

Quickly, dodging a few speeding cars that were still trying to get away from the chaos, she crossed the roads of the Oktagon towards the memorial in the centre. The distant wail of sirens echoed down the avenues around her. Police and ambulances, racing towards the carnage. Budapest was about to become a dangerous place for both Blackwatch and Talon, she realised. She quickened her pace, broke into a run, keeping her rifle level and trained on the fallen figure that was sprawled out on the flagstones next to the memorial.

In her ear, Athena suddenly buzzed and chirruped. “Alert! Agent Lacroix! Talon aircraft inbound, heading for your location!”

Amélie would have stopped dead if she didn’t have Shrike at her mercy. As it was, she kept running. “What?” she hissed, as she hopped up onto the memorial’s broad stone base and began making her way around to where Shrike had fallen.

“One VTOL, approaching from the west…” Athena began, then stopped. “Wait… what…”

“Athena?”

An odd mix of static and electronic warbles came through her earpiece.

“Athena?” Amélie asked again.

“Intrusion… error… vital alert!...”

“Athena, what’s going on?” Amélie demanded, rounding the last curve of the memorial. Shrike hadn’t moved. Amélie closed in. The other woman’s hard-light helmet had been shattered by the bullet, she saw. The emitter was sparking and fizzing, still trying to repair the damage. Amélie tightened her grip on her rifle. If the bullet had hit the emitter, she reasoned, then she probably hadn’t delivered a killing blow. Her trigger finger tightened. She prepared to make sure Shrike stayed dead.

In her ear, a new voice, electronic, masculine, angry: “Autonomous drones subsumed. _I see you, Lacroix_.”

Shrike groaned. From the angle she was at, Amélie couldn’t see Shrike’s face. She took aim. In her ears, VTOL anti-gravs whined and SUV engines roared. Talon and Blackwatch, each racing to be the first backup on the scene. She ignored them. She had to.

On the ground at her feet, Shrike twitched and coughed. “Bloody hell…” she croaked.

Her voice was not filtered by the broken hard-light. Amélie felt like the world had been pulled out from under her.

She recognised that voice. Dear God in His heaven, she recognised that voice. But no, no, _no_ , it couldn’t be, it couldn’t _possibly_ be her, she was dead, she was gone, off to God-knows-where when that thrice-damned fighter plane flew up into a clear blue sky and never came back down…

I her ear, Gabriel screamed: “Amélie! Amélie! Talon’s done something to Athena! We’re entering the Oktagon now, just hold on… oh, _fuck_ , that’s the VTOL, they’re coming in hot! Get out of there!”

Anti-gravs screamed in her ears. She didn’t hear them. Air buffeted her, a dark shape loomed overhead. She didn’t feel it, didn’t see it.

All she saw was Lena Oxton lying on the ground, glaring up at her with eyes full of hate.

“Lena…” she whispered, as if she was frightened that to say the name any louder might dispel whatever illusion was taking place. “Lena… what… how?”

Shrike – Lena – pushed up against the memorial and hauled herself unsteadily to her feet. There was blood all over her face, running from a cut Amélie’s bullet had sliced into her cheek.

Why was Lena wearing Shrike’s clothes, Amélie wondered, dazed, her mind not working properly. Why was she wearing the armour of the woman who’d killed Gérard, who’d carved up Ana, who’d shattered Amélie’s legs with a brutal blow, who’d lopped the head off of Mondatta for all the world to see? Why had she run from Amélie today? Where had she come from? Where had she come _back_ from?

“Lena…”

“Oxton ‘aint in at the moment. But you can leave a message,” Shrike spat.

“I… but…” Amélie’s blood roared in her ears.

The ground shook. Amélie looked around slowly, blinking. A VTOL sat a short way away on the flagstones of the Oktagon, red anti-gravs grumbling and black stealth cladding absorbing the light that fell on it. A door popped open in its flank, a rectangle of harsh white light, and a figure was silhouetted in it.

Her earpiece trembled with that same angry electronic voice from earlier, the one which had mysteriously replaced Athena. “All Talon units: Commander Ghost is on the ground. Blackwatch units approaching from the north-east. Move to contain. Fire on the commander’s mark.”

She looked back round to Lena, to Shrike, no, _no_ , to _Lena_. Behind her, she could see a convoy of SUVs come speeding down the Andrássy Avenue, fanning out across the plaza and racing towards them. One by one they skidded to a halt. Streetlights glimmered off their armoured bodywork. Doors opened, soldiers spilled out. Some, she recognised. Gabriel Reyes led the charge across the Oktagon towards her.

“Lena… you’re alive.”

It was trite, it was stupid, it was obvious, but it needed to be said. She’d dreamed of saying it for years, on dark and lonely days. She’d wept in Gérard’s arms, then wept alone once he was taken too. _By Lena_ , the last shreds of rational thought screamed at her, _taken by Lena, something horrible has happened to her_ , but she ignored them.

Footsteps behind her. She turned. _Who next, back from the dead?_ The thought skittered through her head. Gérard? Ana? Jack?

A man in black combat armour and who cradled a pulse rifle stood behind her. A steel visor covered his face and a red eye slit glared at her. A shock of white hair topped his head. Black smoke wisped from seams in his clothes, like the inside of him was on fire.

“Agent Shrike,” the man said, addressing Lena. His voice was harsh, broken, cold.

“That’s… not her name,” Amélie murmured.

“Yes, it is,” Shrike said bluntly. “Hey, boss. Took your sweet time.”

“Came as fast as I could. Sorry.”

“Whatever.” Shrike nodded at Amélie. “Your orders?” Hard-light hummed at her wrists.

The man – Ghost, was that what the voice that had replaced Athena had called him? – shook his head. “Leave her. We’ve got bigger problems.”

Here came bigger problems, running at a speed the Soldier Enhancement Programme had worked hard to achieve. Gabriel Reyes came tearing towards them, his greatcoat flying out behind him, leaving the rest of the Blackwatch squad in the dust – only to stop dead at the sight of the man in black.

In less time than it took to blink, Ghost and Reyes had their weapons trained on each other.

“Strike-Commander Reyes,” Ghost said, with an air of bitter, icy politeness.

“Ghost,” Reyes spat back.

Ghost looked Reyes up and down, taking in the man’s sleek body armour and coat. “Nice outfit. Who’d you have to kill to get it?”

Reyes spat on the floor. “Never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it.”

Ghost laughed at that. “Must be why I’m still alive, then.” He looked past Reyes, at the assembled Blackwatch soldiers crouching behind their SUVs and all aiming at him. Amélie saw Jesse, his distinctive hat marking him out a mile away, sighting down his revolver towards them. “Care to make a deal?”

Gabriel scoffed. “Blackwatch doesn’t make deals with terrorists.” He paused. The muzzles of his shotguns didn’t waver an inch from Ghost’s faceplate. “What did you have in mind?”

Ghost shrugged. “Pretty simple exchange. I take Shrike. You take Lacroix. I leave. You leave. Anubis doesn’t crash Athena’s drones on your heads. Like I said: simple.”

Reyes looked up. The drones were stealthed, invisible to the naked eye, but he knew they were up there and he knew the kind of damage a hydrogen-fuelled craft could do if it came out of the sky at a hundred miles an hour.

He looked back down. At Amélie, at Ghost, and then finally at Lena.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the latter.

“For what?” Shrike scoffed.

Gabriel didn’t answer, just glared daggers at Ghost. “Deal,” he spat. “Take her and go.”

“Guess there’s a few brain cells left in you after all, Reyes,” Ghost hissed.

Reyes said nothing. He didn’t really need to, his expression spoke for him.

“Well, this _was_ a touching little reunion, wasn’t it?” Shrike laughed. She pointed across at Amélie, who was looking from one to the other with her jaw sagging, desperately trying to process what she had seen in the last few minutes. “I think Lacroix has broken, by the way.” She grinned at Gabriel. “Maybe try turning her off and on again, yeah?”

Ghost gave an exasperated sigh. “Come on, Shrike. Let’s go.”

“Roger that,” Shrike trilled.

Ghost turned on his heel and began walking towards the VTOL. Shrike followed, bouncing on her heels just like Lena used to, like all the fighting that had brought them to this moment had never happened, like the blood on her face and the ragged gash on her cheek from Amélie’s bullet was just a playground scrape.

They were clambering through the VTOL’s door before Amélie came to her senses. “Wait!” she cried, taking a step forward. “Lena!”

Shrike didn’t wait. She merely gave Amélie a little boy-scout salute as the VTOL’s flank sealed itself up behind her, and for a moment Amélie was back in England, six years ago, waving goodbye on the tarmac as a sleek jet fighter rolled towards the runway and a young woman with ridiculous hair and an annoying accent and a beautiful smile gave her a salute in return, right-back-atcha Amélie and I’ll see you after the test, so long!

_Six years! So long, indeed_ , Amélie thought.

Footsteps ran up behind her, Blackwatch soldiers converging on them. Gabriel shouted at them to hold their fire. Jesse’s face loomed in the corner of her vision, clicking his fingers in front of her eyes – “Amélie? Amélie? You still with us, darlin’?” – and she heard the screech and crackled in her ear as Athena finally fought her way through Anubis’ firewalls.

But all she focussed on was the dwindling red of the Talon VTOL’s anti-gravs as it lumbered up into the air and flew off into the night.

 

* * *

 

The man who called himself Ghost felt the bottom drop out of his stomach as the VTOL climbed skywards. Through the window, he saw the lights of Budapest drop away below them before they were blotted out by the cloud layer.

Opposite him, Shrike sat kicking her heels against the bottom of her seat, a bundle of restless energy, still on an adrenaline high from the flight from Blackwatch.

“So, boss, where to next?” she asked him after a short while.

Ghost reached up and removed his visor. Jack Morrison’s faded and broken face looked mournfully back at him from the reflection in the window.

“Home,” he said simply. And then: “Redoubt. Fifty. Blue. Electric.”

Shrike slumped forwards, like someone had pulled a power cable out of her, and then, slowly, Lena looked up at him with bleary eyes.

“Wha…?” she mumbled, sitting up straight, putting a hand to the gash Amélie’s bullet had scored down her cheek. “God, my head hurts. Cap? That you?”

“Right here, Lena.”

The memories would filter through soon enough, Jack knew. Of what she’d done, when the other had control. Four Blackwatch commandos. A few civilians who got in her way. And Amélie, standing stunned and broken as she saw what Talon had done to the woman she’d loved.

Jack felt like he should comfort her. Reach a hand across the gap between them and rest it on her shoulder, tell her she’d be okay, it wasn’t ever her fault, comforting little nothings that might soften the coming blows just a little.

But he didn’t. It would just have felt too hypocritical, too wrong, since he was the one who had spoken those words and dredged Shrike back up to the fore – to save her, maybe, maybe not, maybe just to keep her from Gabriel’s clutches. Maybe just so that at the end of the day there would be someone else at Talon who he could show his face to. So instead he sat back and gazed out of the window, as the VTOL banked hard and headed for home, and as Lena crumpled and sobbed opposite him as the first of the memories began to re-emerge.

Along the way, as the VTOL made its way through the inky skies, he found the time to wonder what had happened to that starry-eyed young man called Jack Morrison who had signed up to make the world a better place, all those long years ago.

**Author's Note:**

> I know 'Shrike' is technically Ana's codename in the lore, but it's a bird that kills its prey by impaling them on plant thorns, so it was just too accurate a name to pass up for Lena's new personality. Also, visit Budapest if you ever can, it's a beautiful city.
> 
> So, I might make this the start of something new? We'll have to see how things go...


End file.
